Red quits the smartphone business after a single, terrible phone

• 

  The Red phone. It's scary-looking.

Red, the high-end cinema camera company, started teasing the world with its first smartphone in 2017. The Red "Hydrogen One" was a gigantic, $1,300 slab of a smartphone, with an aluminum or titanium body, ribbed hand grips on the sides, a "holographic" 3D display, and a modular system that, one day, promised to put an actual Red camera module on your Red smartphone. Red said the phone would "shatter the mold of conventional thinking," calling it a "holographic media machine in your pocket."

Red, it turns out, was all talk.

After the release of a single phone and zero camera modules, Red's smartphone division is now dead. The company's founder, Jim Jannard, announced the death of the project-and his retirement-on the Hydrogen forums. Jannard simply writes, "I will be shutting down the HYDROGEN project" without offering any other thoughts on his foray into the smartphone market.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments